The Pros and Cons of Education Technology

The article I just read is about weighing the pros and cons of education technology.  It talks about going away from purchasing text books and replacing them with e-reader.  They talk about how e-readers are nice, but will they be able to hold up to the rigor that students will put them through.  When you think about all the things students do with their textbooks, that is a very valid concern.

This article also talks about video conferencing and the benefits of it to businesses for the reduction in travel costs.  But for education there are some draw backs.  First with internet connectivity.  Not all students have high speed internet or even internet is some areas.  There is also a limit for the schools in the amount of space it takes on the server when all the students are trying to hit at the same time.  Both very legitimate concerns.

The third are that is covered in this article is about virtual lab training software.  This one especially was interesting to me because I was just in a meeting where this was discussed.  We were talking about increasing dual enrollment and how we could look at virtual labs to do some of our health classes at other locations to be more assessable to students.  This article talks about how virtual labs may be good for middle school and maybe lower grade high school students but when it comes to college students they may not be so good.   They talk about how students no longer have to wait for a bacterial culture to grow, it does it immediately with the software.  The problem being when the student is faced with the real life situation, they may not know how to handle it.

I believe technology is great and it has it place, but I can see the legitimacy of all the concerns that were brought up.

Resources:  http://www.emergingedtech.com/2011/06/education-technology-weighing-the-pros-and-cons/